Ansible 101 - Episode 6 - Ansible Vault and Roles

Jeff Geerling (geerlingguy) explores Ansible Vault and playbook organization using Roles from chapters 5 and 6 in the bestselling Ansible book, Ansible for DevOps.

Contents:

00:00:00 - Intro
00:06:30 - Questions from last episode
00:10:51 - Intro to Ansible Vault
00:14:00 - Encrypting a vars file with Vault
00:17:55 - Decrypt, encrypt, edit, rekey, etc.
00:21:33 - Task features - conditionals and tags
00:25:54 - Blocks
00:27:05 - Chapter 5 Cowsay
00:27:26 - Playbook organization
00:30:05 - Includes and imports
00:35:13 - Caution about dynamic tasks
00:37:18 - Playbook includes
00:46:06 - Roles
00:51:27 - Options for including Roles
00:52:30 - Real-world flexible role usage
01:00:33 - The Golden Hammer
01:01:12 - Outtro

[TheDEVENSUJI]

Hey Jeff. I can't thank you enough for making these videos. You are doing an absolutely noble job and I'm sure you'll get paid back handsomely. Thanks for being such great tutor.

[fredrik]

I truly appreciate this. Just getting into Ansible and using roles was easy and made life so much easier. Great explanation and showcase!

[braykov]

Hi, what a timing. I just finished watching episode 5. And I am currently reading chapter 7. I intend to keep it going like this.
I am watching you from Bulgaria.

[tzelon]

Hey Jeff, just wanted to thank you for the great videos. I'm leaning a lot from it.

[jeromelacqua]

Hi Jeff
I follow you since many years on galaxy and also the books you ve done, thanks for all your work with ansible and also for sharing it with us! Now ansible has its you tube channel! Cheers from South of France!

[VJ-rhrj]

Hi Jeff, thank you so much for making these videos, bought your book recently. Love from India

[Username-hbqi]

Great introduction. Thank you. I was looking for roles and this was great.

[mathewkargarzadeh]

Thanks Jeff for sharing your wonderful knowledge. much appreciated !!. Mat.

[KingstonFortune]

Running this in 2022, and I encountered errors in the "Check list of running nodejs apps." ansible always returns command forever not found.
I decided to ssh into the centos server and I noticed that running the forever command as a normal user works but using root returns the error.
so to solve the problem, I applied become: false to both "Check list of running nodejs apps." and "Start example Nodejs app." which are the last two tasks.
Hopefully this helps someone.

To know the exact tasks I am referring to in the video, see this timeframe: 44:06
In the text editor, see line 45 to line 52

[DavidMedberry]

Played back very nice at 1.5x speed. Thanks Jeff.

[pmirji]

awesome stuff...concepts are explained really well

[vincentricci]

Much appreciate all the tips. great job!

[TheAman]

may god bless you for all that you're doing for the community. Love from India 🇮🇳

[elabeddhahbi]

i missed the free book but at least i still can watch the videos nice series i really appreciated

[gineesh]

Wonderful one.. Thanks for doing such.. (y)

[Squash_Man]

In the world of SAS we use includes for repeatable code that is used in multiple SAS programs. This a lot of times are the file layouts or table lookups. This way you only have to edit the include file instead of dozens of programs. I would say that is really the main reason for Ansible import.

[mikeeggleston]

Thank you for making the video. Tags could be useful for STIG plays.

[michaelvilain]

You've answered a question I've been asking myself after write Ansible code "in a vacuum" with no one to review it. If a role's main task get long, when is it a good idea to break it into separate files and include them rather than search for that bit of code in a long file.

[tony-ma]

I have a lot of difficaulty to follow along the practise as I am using a MacOS with Apple M1 chip and the virtual box isn't available. I have purchased parallels pro and using it as a provider but lot's of cases I cannot find suitable box to run your script. It will be great if you can provide more details how M1 Mac with Parallels or Dockers to follow the practise. Many thanks. Great content.

[Oswee]

I use tags when i build the role for debug reasons. I simply don't want to run and wait the hole playbook or role just to debug a single task.